March 29, 2011- Andrew Breitbart says he still stands by everything he's said about Shirley Sherrod, the former U.S.D.A. official who filed a lawsuit against him charging he defamed her by "publishing an intentionally false and misleading clip" that damaged her reputation.

In an interview with TPM following his speech before the True the Vote national summit on Saturday, Breitbart said that the Sherrod story -- in which Breitbart's Big Government website posted what turned out to be a selectively edited video clip of Sherrod that made it appear as though she was bragging about discriminating against a white farmer -- has always been about the Pigford settlement, even if he didn't realize it in the beginning.

"I still stand by everything I said in the past as it relates to that story," Breitbart said. "I'm excited for the discovery phase of this. I wasn't intimidated by her saying ... her slander saying that I want to, you know, bring blacks to slavery. What a predictable methodology of attack by the left. You know everyone is worried about slander -- what she said to me is slanderous."

"This is about Pigford. It has always been about Pigford. The court case will prove this beyond a reasonable doubt," Breitbart said.

Breitbart said that the Pigford II settlement -- which offers $50,000 to those black farmers who say they were discriminated against by the government -- has been "sold in the black churches as reparations and sold at reparations conventions by the proponents of it as reparations." (Breitbart held a press conference at the Conservative Political Action Conference and released audio from an event they say shows just that.)

"Shirley Sherrod's attorney is one of the primary proponents of reparations in this country," Breitbart said. (Late Update: Breitbart tells TPM he was referring to Sherrod's lawyer in the Pigford case, Rose Sanders, and not her lawyer in the libel suit as I originally believed. Sanders was the founder of the Slavery-Civil War Museum, National Voting Rights Museum and was a member of the Reparations Coordinating Committee).